Critical Essay by Donald Rackin

SOURCE: "The Alice Books and Lewis Carroll's World," in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 3-12.

Rackin is known as an authority on Lewis Carroll. In the following essay, he places the Alice books in their Victorian social context.

This study rests on the premise that appreciating Lewis Carroll's Alice books (1862-72) does not require extensive knowledge of their historical setting. Their continuous popularity among large and varied audiences for the past 120 years shows how accessible they are: lay readers seeking to experience and understand their power need not acquire a vocabulary of outdated words and unfamiliar historical facts, of obsolete concepts and attitudes. This does not mean, however, that the Alices are unrelated to their original cultural matrix: like all other artifacts, they are products of their era, bearing inscriptions...